Ossi, Ossi, Ossi

The 'Ost' wasn't all that bad after all - was it? A scene from Goodbye, Lenin!

Goodbye, Lenin! mines a niggling nostalgia for the human values of the old East Germany. By Stephanie Bunbury.

The people who used to be West Germans call them Ossis, the arriviste capitalists from the eastern (or "Ost") side of the Wall. In 1989, there was no mistaking them. Ossis wore trademark stonewash denim, long out of fashion in the west. Ossis had terrible haircuts and rough manners.

They also cost a lot. In the first decade after the Wall fell, Germany spent $US800 billion ($A1100 billion) on reunification, equivalent to a $US12,000 "solidarity tax" on every Western citizen. They didn't even seem grateful.

In fact, they weren't. In the old East, the initial euphoria of regime change had dwindled to dull resentment. Droves of people were suddenly out of work, something they had never had to contemplate before. Those who had jobs earned much less than their Western counterparts. They knew the Wessis thought they were country hicks.

The point of the new Germany, however, was that life should return to normal. Accordingly, the disturbing recent past was subject to a collective forgetting; the present was the important thing.

Last year, I met up with Michael Heyward of Melbourne's Text Books at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where he was trying to find a German publisher for Anna Funder's Stasiland, a really wonderful piece of reportage about East Germany's secret police. Nobody was interested. They told him nobody would read a book like that. It was too soon.

But just six months after that conversation, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin!, a comedy entirely about the demise of the socialist state, hit the German cinemas. At first, the cinema chains were not interested: nobody would want to see a film like that. But the movie took the country by sturm. So far, it has garnered six million domestic viewers, nine Lola awards (the German Oscars) and an audience of all ages.

"People from the East are always afraid there will be another comedy where we laugh about them. But this film is telling them they have nothing to be ashamed of." Wolfgang Becker

Goodbye, Lenin! is no kind of history, even of the soft-centred kind; it is more of a rollicking yarn. Alex Kerner, played by Daniel Bruehl, is a young television technician and all-round regular guy. Since his father, a doctor, skipped the country for the West, his mother Christiane (Katrin Suss) has devoted her life to promoting happiness under the dictatorship of the proletariat, petitioning the authorities on tiny consumer matters, and training Young Pioneers to sing their improving songs in melodious harmony. Then, after a sudden heart attack, Christiane slides into a coma. She is asleep for nine months.

As it turns out, this was no time to drop off. In those nine months, the Wall is torn down, the Honeckers deposed and the West starts moving into their block of flats. The lives of the young Kerners go into a rapid spin. Alex's repair shop is closed, but he is picked for an East-West team installing satellite dishes. His sister Ariane (Maria Simon) gives up studying and gets a job at Burger King. The two of them even get rid of the furniture, shoddy old laminated stuff in dim shades of brown; Ikea is now in town, after all. Once the past is over, it is just so over.

Then their mother wakes up, and her children hardly know what to do. Any shock or excitement, the doctor warns, could kill her - and what could be more shocking than the collapse of her beloved East Germany?

So Alex devises an elaborate ruse. They will hide the fact that Germany is reunited. She is bedridden. She simply won't be allowed to know.

Christiane's old bedroom is returned to brown socialist sobriety, while Alex combs skips for jars of old Ossi products that nobody wants or sells any more, carefully pouring new capitalist jam and pickled cucumbers into the old socialist jars.

Goodbye, Lenin! is a gentle, humane view of people who simply do their decent best and deserve to be recognised for it, even though their best would never have much muscle against the enormity of an evil government. It is also beautifully done.

Wolfgang Becker was born a West German. He and his co-writer, Bernd Lichtenberg, researched Goodbye, Lenin! by placing advertisements that drew thousands of responses from former citizens of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. "People from the East are always afraid there will be another comedy where we laugh about them," he says. "But this film is telling them they have nothing to be ashamed of. This is not a film where one part of Germany laughs at the other part. It's a kind of reunified laughter. I think it is the first time we have had that."

There is a phenomenon now called Ostalgie, meaning nostalgia for things Eastern. It is a mix of gilded memories of socialist fraternity and a fashion for retro kitsch. Even some of Christiane's favourite brands of jam, coffee, detergent and pickles are back on the shelves; shops actually boast that "we sell Eastern goods". Daniel Bruehl says that people who recognise him in his local supermarket greet him with jars of cucumbers. There are, he says, even plans for DDR theme park.

But some of the memories Becker mined went beyond pickled cucumbers, right to the heart of what it meant to be part of a consciously egalitarian community. "It was a totalitarian system, a system of injustice, but on the other hand there were people living just a normal life," he says. "That's what people are telling us. They had more solidarity in the East, human relationships were deeper, life wasn't that superficial. So there are some human virtues people remember."

Ostalgie romanticises that past, without a doubt. "But on the other hand, the DDR was taken over so fast that people did not have the chance to bury the DDR in dignity."

In that view, he has no less a supporter than Gerhard Schroeder. The German Chancellor told Time magazine recently that, "From a state perspective, we have created one Germany. But if you look into people's hearts, we haven't yet."